Peter Linebarger’s Wife Was Susannah HOOT
This is in the way of a hypothesis and I do invite criticism and/or corroborating information from you Linebarger/Lineberger and Hoot(s) genealogists.
There seems to be no determination as to which family Susannah, the wife of Peter Linebarger (born about 1742 in Pennsylvania) belonged. I’ve come across a personal record that was written by the great grandson of Susan(nah), a daughter of Daniel Linebarger, a son of Peter. This is the Peter, who had moved to Lincoln County, North Carolina with his siblings Lewis, Johannes and Susannah. According to genealogical records I’ve seen, Susan or sometimes Susannah married William A. Reed, the son of James Reed, on 15 April 1834. The record is written exactly as follows: “Deth. Susan. Hoot.Reed did october the 20 1888 aged 76 years 9 month and 20 dayes” The writer, Lee Boyd Honeycutt’s grandmother was Harriet Jean Reed Nance, the daughter of Susan. He was born in 1881 and died in 1975. His 94 year old daughter has several sheets of paper, on which he had taken the time to write down birthdates, death dates and marriage dates of his relatives; in other words, a gold mine for a genealogist. He was not a genealogist, but a simple man, who became the head of the family when mother, a widow, died when he was sixteen. He then worked in a cotton mill in Davidson, North Carolina and became an elder at Mt. Zion Methodist Church in Cornelius. I give you this information so that you know he had no ulterior motive. The closest Hoot(s) families at that time seem to have been in the area of Surry County, North Carolina. The trip was no short journey from Lincoln County (in what is now southern Catawba County) in the latter 18th and early 19th centuries. It still isn’t.
So we must come back to the only connection that I know of between the Linebargers and Hoots and that is their relationship in Pennsylvania in the mid 18th century before migrating south to Virginia and then North Carolina. Juliana Youley Linebarger (Lineberger) married Michael Hoot(s) and their daughter was Anna Maria Hoot(e), who was born on 17 September 1774. Anna later married John, a son of Johannes Linebarger, a brother of Juliana.
My conclusion is that since his sister, Juliana married a Hoot, Peter also married a Hoot, possibly a sister or cousin of Michael Hoot(s), the husband of Juliana. I have multiple examples of this in my ancestry as I’m sure many of you do. Daniel, the son of Peter, then named one of his three daughters, after tradition, Susannah Hoot Linebarger, Hoot being the maiden name of his mother. There is plenty of precedence for this in the first half of the 19th century at least in this part of North Carolina. It is also possible that Daniel simply liked the sound of the name “Hoot” or wanted to honor his brother-in-law Michael, but I don’t think either of these is probable. The fact that her maiden name wasn’t passed down to us is also something that most of us have had to deal with as well with other ancestral lines.
I take responsibility for the above, but I’d like to thank Ron Stephens for his useful information that helped me put this together and, of course, the late Lee Boyd Honeycutt. I apologize for the length of this writing, but I couldn’t see how it could have been shortened.